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Dec
31
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I started this last year and though I'd do it again.
Best Moment
Last year it was a toss up between Jack learning to use the potty and England qualifying for the World Cup. This year - the kids win again - this year (over the course of a long weekend) - my five year old daughter Lilly learned to ride her bike without training-wheels. Watching her cycling off into the distance made me feel very proud. If anyone needs advice on teaching kids to loose the training-wheels - leave a comment.
Worst Moment
Watching England's performance in the World Cup and realizing we were going to blow it.
Best Blog
I still read many of Sun's bloggers but the one blog I have read consistently is Seth Godin's.
Best Gadget
Last year it was my (very inexpensive) GPS receiver for my Treo - something I still use a lot of the time - and something I find invaluable when travelling. This year it's pretty tricky. The two contenders are my home SunRay (something I use every day and I still think it's one of those game-changing products that way too few people are aware of); the second is the Logitech Harmony 880 Universal Remote (a Christmas present) - five remote controls was driving my wife crazy - harmony has been restored. I think the Harmony wins.
Worst Gadget
I had to think hard about this one. This is tough - it's my beloved Treo650 that I've ranted about over the last couple of years. Here's why. I recently had to replace my Treo (having dropped it too often) - before I shelled out $300 I looked at a couple of other smartphones and they all make the Treo650 look really dated. The reason I stuck with the Treo is that I have 3 or 4 applciations I use a lot that aren't all available on other (newer) models and makes. Unless Palm gets their act together - it's probably the last Palm I'll buy - the competition looks too good. My initial infatuation with the Treo meant I tollerated the crashes and out of memory errors - not any more.
Best Book
Last year this was easy - this year I'm struggling between Blink and Freakonomics - looking at my Audible library - I gave Freakonomics 5 stars vs. 4 for Blink - so Freakonomics gets the prize this year.
Best Film
No films really stood out this year - though I've enjoyed watching TLOTR trilogy again - now in HD (OK - upconverted DVD). I'm going to break the rules a bit and vote for Lost - over the Autumn we watched the entire Season 1 & 2 on DVD (via NetFlix) and season 3 on HBO - I can't wait for it to restart in February.
Worst Film
Da Vinci Code - I enjoyed the book and decided to get the DVD as my wife hadn't read it. Great story, great actors - what happened ?
Best Application
I've been using Google calendar for the last six months and have completely given up the various other calendars I'd been maintaining. It almost rocks and I have high hopes for it continuing to improve. I just hope Google doesn't become big and evil - I'd hate to have to look for place to park my appointments.
Biggest Disappointment
World Cup 2006 (Soccer / Footie). England had some of the most hyped and over-paid players in the game and played like a bunch of guys who hadn't played together before. Overall - the tournament was great - and England's part was pretty minor.
Have a great new year, Rich.
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Sep
22
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Looks like I got Schwartzed. I guess now I'll have to leave my Laptop at home ! Re-reading my post - it's interesting that my motivations for lugging a laptop were : "catch up with Tivo", "maybe do some work", (and adding a third) make phone calls with Skype*. Maybe that is the PC's salvation - high-end portable entertainment for travelling executives. Anyway, I'll try and blog my experiences.
*also intersting is that I keep a Windows partition on my Ubuntu laptop just so I can make cheap calls with Skype !
Technorati Tags: treo, ubuntu, schwartz, skype
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Sep
21
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Tim Bray asks whether the mobile / PDA / Crackbery / Palm is the future. Having come from Europe where mobile technology has been better utilized for much longer (reasons available on demand) - the answer is clearly No - it's not the future - it's the now for many people. But I'm a relative laggard, I've been a laptop wielding road-warrior for much of my working life but only very recently do I feel comfortable leaving my laptop at home (it hasn't left my Wifi radius in about six months). If I know I'm only travelling to Sun offices then this is all I need :
That said I'll often lug a laptop around if I know a) I'm going to be on a long flight - I can catch up on some Tivo or do some work; b) I'll be catching up with work at night in my hotel room; c) will have little or no access to a SunRay.
I'm travelling next week - and seriously considering whether to lug my laptop (and associated paraphenalia). If planes and hotels deployed some secure thin client technology with a decent internet connection then I'd be happy.
If you are stuck with your laptop - it's hard to let go - a Treo / Blackberry isn't a complete replacement - but it satisifies a whole different set of use cases. A more interesting question (I often ask myself) is - if I had to take just one gadget with me - which would it be ? - in my case - my Treo is the only possible answer.
Technorati Tags: treo, crackberry, sunray
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Jun
28
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Sorry if you arrived here looking for pictures of scantily clad beach volleyball players - but read on - there might be something here for you.
I've recently officially ditched my office in Santa Clara and now my assigned office is at home. In the last 7 years at Sun - I've only rarely used an office - I've always preferred the work / life balance that working from home gives me. Also, as Sun are closing some Bay Area campuses - it seemed unfair for me to be hogging barely use office space.
As part of that move, I recently installed a new SunRay 170 in my home office. If you don't know what a SunRay is (which many don't) - it's an ultra-thin stateless client that allows me to work as if I were inside Sun's firewall (and not have to bother with overloaded VPN connections). It's also very secure (multi-level authentication) and it's stateless nature gives me a feature not found anywhere else - Session Mobility. Basically - I can pull my smart card out of the SunRay - drive to another Sun Office - put my card in and my session continues just where I left off. This is a great feature for me - I typically have 20-30 windows open over multiple vitrual desktops - and having to re-create that environment is a real pain. As an aside I tested this feature live in front of a customer this week at Sun's Executive Briefing Center.
Another awesome feature is that it generates no noise (it has no fan or other moving parts) and virtually no heat so it keeps my office much cooler than a desktop / laptop and apparently uses the same amount of electricity as a light bulb (so saves me money too).
There are still a number of things I need to figure out - occasional latency issues, mounting a USB drive, using a scroll wheel mouse, installing performancing, access to Thunderbird / Firefox - but so far, so good.
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Jul
19
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I'm a self confessed gadget-head; I've always had an interest in technology and the art of "how things work"; often an innovation comes along that really gets my interest though probably a lot less than most people - it takes something pretty specical to pique my interest.
One of the most overlooked gadgets I'm exposed to on a fairly resular basis is the Sun Ray. I admit that it's not the primary device I use during my workday (ie. I don't have one in my office or at home [yet]) - I'm still "tied to a laptop" (I'll explain that dichotomy later). I typically use a SunRay when I'm in a remote office and just need to dive into my mail quickly (yes quickly) - unpacking, booting, connecting my laptop vs. plugging my card into the screen; I also use them when I'm giving a presentation (inside Sun, conference rooms have Sun Rays integrated into the A/V system) - I usually drop my preso. into a mounted folder on my laptop or home machine before hand; then simply plug my card into the screen and start presenting. I really hate it when you have to wait for a speaker to connect their laptop, change the resolution, plug in the power, mouse, etc. So when I present at Sun Executive Briefing Center - I'm always really amazed when I plug in my card and the session resumes exactly where I left off - usually the last slide of the last presentation I made.
OK, back to the "tied to my laptop comment". I'm lucky, I have a really small, modern laptop (a Vaio S170B) but it is still WAY TOO BIG for what it does - it does mail, browsing, blog editing and documents. I'm sick of lugging it around (plus all the associated cables). So, I have a plan to detach myself from it - soon I'll be able to pick up corporate mail on my Treo650 - so, I'll always have the option of dipping into my mail wherever I am (something the laptop can't do despite increasing coverage of 802.11) - when I'm in an office or at home, I'll have SunRays (when I join the WFH program).
One of the under-hyped aspects of Sun Rays is that they are extremely unintrusive - ie. they do what they do without you really having to invest much time in them - it seems that every time I turn on my home Windows machine these days I have to perform some kind of upgrade, malware eradication or virus scan of one form or another. I guess that's mostly a Windows issue but having my machine adminstered centrally is also a part of it - for example I'll no longer be responsible for backing-up my laptop (you all back-up your laptop regularly I presume ?)
So, where does this lead ? Eventually my laptop gets relegated to long road-trips without access to a Sun office (ie, writing documents, etc.) - this is a pretty infrequent thing these days. Amazing when you think I have been absolutely attached to a laptop for the last six years - that's progress.
Note - this was blogged on my laptop - I'll be looking at some blogging tools for Palm V this week.
Technorati Tags : SunRay, Treo650
